Loving yourself/knowing your worth is a lot harder than it looks when you’ve been criticized by so many people that are supposed to love you for who you are.

Loving yourself/knowing your worth is a lot harder than it looks when you’ve been criticized by so many people that are supposed to love you for who you are. An estimated 60-80% of visits to primary care physicians have a stress related component.

Research shows that 75-98% of mental, physical and behavioral illness comes from ones thought life. Loving myself has been a lifelong journey that I feel will I forever continue to roller coaster through. There’s really no way to avoid it. From birth we’re taught to live by a certain standard and mold into exactly what we’re “supposed” to be. My whole life I’ve been criticized for my own thoughts and behaviors by people who are supposed to lift me up and love me for who I am. I’m not going to be calling anyone out in this but will just say people very close to me have depicted this picture of me to be evil because I don’t like to wear my heart on my sleeve with a lot of things, for good reasoning of events that have happened in my life, which will be brought up later in a different piece. I was raised in a Christian home and raised to believe the ways of the Bible and living for Jesus. Throughout my life I felt myself stray away from that and get pulled back time and time again especially in my adult life. I make excuses for it like “I don’t have the time” or “I’m focusing on other things right now” which I need to stop doing because in order to love myself I have to know that I’m loved by the person that made me. Now before anyone gets they’re panties in a wad that I’m talking about my religion just know that no I’m not a Christian that will fault you for not believing in God or believing in other things or thinking a different way, the way you pursue your life is entirely up to you and and it doesn’t affect me in anyway shape or form. I personally have just had too many instances in my life where I felt God so strongly I have no reason to not believe. Majority of my family members are typically very emotional and I’m not so much that way and I’ve been faulted for that many times throughout my life because I don’t find it “fun” to cry with people. The fact of the matter is is that everyone has a different defense mechanism/coping mechanism whatever you wanna call it for the ways that you deal with emotions. I prefer to with myself or my husband a lot of the time I don’t even share thoughts I have with my closest friends because I just don’t deep emotions about myself out loud. We’ve all of course been told hurtful things but there’s been a few things that have stuck out to me. I more recently had a long time friend that told me “money meant nothing to me”. I was MIND BLOWN. I enjoy nice things yes don’t we all, but in no way am I materialistic. I was told by a family member “I’m not emotional enough”. People don’t realize how much words can stick with people and how they may affect them. Don’t get me wrong I fall short of this at times as well, we’re all humans but just try and think before you say things. On the other end try focusing on the positive instead of the negative and be confident in who you are. I go back-and-forth a lot of being proud of myself and being disappointed in myself which I feel like is a natural thing to do throughout your life. My sophomore year of high school I was attending church every Sunday and every Wednesday and coming to an understanding of who I was and who I wanted to be both physically and mentally. As I said before I strayed away from that and I haven’t gotten back on that frequent track since. I will say losing someone important to me and dealing with grief has caused me to have a lot of built-up anger, which I’m aware is unhealthy, but I feel it’s just a part of the process. More recently I feel myself becoming someone that I don’t want to be and that I’m disappointed in. I feel lazy, tired and overwhelmed. I broke down to my husband just the other day about how I feel like so much weight is on my shoulders and there’s nothing I can do with it so that’s kind of what spurted me to start writing again. On a day-to-day basis I try to balance being a wife, a working woman, maintaining a social life, bettering my career, being a good daughter, a role model sister/cousin, a good friend. By the end of the day I’m left with nothing for myself because I’m focusing on who I am for everyone else instead of WHO I AM FOR MYSELF. Of course as women we’re  natural gossips and I’m sure we’ll never stray away from that stereotype. More recently I found myself being very judgemental of people who live freely and happily and I started to step back and look at myself and question what in the world was going on in my head. Am I unhappy with myself? Is that why I’m having to fault others for their happiness? Happiness looks different on everyone. Happiness also comes in different forms for everyone. I don’t want to be someone that has to tear others down and fault them for doing what makes them happy to try and make myself happier. Being in the beauty industry naturally you get sucked into a little extra gossip. Working with all women can lots of the time be very trying. I found myself getting sucked in to topics of conversation that I had no right discussing about another person. Whether the way their hair looked, their eyebrows, their shirt, etc of a long list of stupid meaningless things. I’m willing to own up to all parts of this in hopes to make other people become aware of their own thoughts and reason. I want to be someone that people look to you and think wow I want to be as kind and thoughtful as she is. I want to get back to living for Jesus and showing more of my kind heart to others. I often times try to put myself in others shoes, in order to see where they’re coming from and try to better understand, because if I didn’t do that I would drive myself insane on why they do things and think the way they do. Now as far as body image goes, my whole entire life I have struggled a LOT with this. Growing up I was definitely always the bigger one out of my sister and by no means have I ever been quote on quote “fat” in my life but growing up around my mom and my sister who have both always been naturally tiny people was definitely trying on my mental state. My sister to this day can eat Taco Bell, McDonald’s and whatever she pleases and still remain to have muscle definition in her stomach and legs. They both have always had complaints to say about their bodies leaving me wondering what they must think of mine. I’ve been shamed before for being insecure about my shape because I’m a petite person, which I don’t think is fair because I’m my opinion everyone has a different expectation for themself, so what’s good enough for one person may not be for the other. Before I became allergic to gluten and dairy, after high school I gained about 20 to 25 pounds which I know is normal and everyone says the “freshman 15” but it definitely hit me hard because of how hard I’ve always been on myself about the way I wanted my body to look. I began to stop eating because everything I ate was making my stomach hurt and majority of the time I would just throw it up because of how sick I felt. I lost 14 pounds out of nowhere, wanting to but not at all trying and that was when I found out that I had to be gluten-free. It definitely took a toll on me because I of course like anyone else love burritos, pizza and pasta. But I knew that it was going to help me make healthier choices in my meals. Body image has by far been my most trying part of loving myself. I know I have a good heart but i just couldn’t remain on the outside what I wanted to be. As women we naturally fluctuate about 5 to 10 pounds between our menstrual week, ovulation and not to mention the hormones and the cravings we just naturally have and can’t say no to LOL. When my papa passed away I lost an unhealthy amount of weight and began to find confidence because of how skinny I was. I weighed 111 pounds at 20 years old. Now for some people that’s a healthy weight, for me at almost 5’5 and normally have some kind of muscle mass, that is not healthy weight and I didn’t look healthy but I thought that I was happy with the way I looked because that’s how most of the models look on Instagram or in magazines. Shortly after that I began to realize that I was only happy at the way I looked on the outside, because of always having my “Portuguese pooch” and wanting to have such a flat stomach, I began to push away what I was feeling on the inside and not deal with my emotions at hand. I know I’m still struggling and taking it day by day with my diet with still little self-control at saying no to Taco Bell and ice cream LOL but I’ve come to a point to right now realize that everybody deals with that. Everybody has a different body type. No one is born the same each person is comfortable in their own skin in different ways because if not that’d be boring. We’d have no diversity to come make us come to these realizations. We don’t all have to have a flat stomach and look the same to be happy. I want to focus more on the inner than the outer. I’ve come to terms that there’s no way to be 110% confident with yourself, mentally and physically, you’re always going to have doubts, there’s always going to be a part of yourself that you’re going to want to better, but as long as you’re willing to put in 110% of work into bettering yourself then you’re headed in the right direction. In the wise words of my inspirer Indy Blue “Life became significantly more enjoyable when I finally decided I was pretty” -🤍